The Marketers Guide to Virtual Reality & Brands

The Marketers Guide to Virtual Reality & Brands

The Marketers Guide to Virtual Reality & Brands

December 21, 2016Richard Brett

All around us we are seeing new technology change the way we do marketing. Over the last 15 years we have seen the internet and then social media rapidly change the way we engage with audiences. Now we are seeing another radical revolution, with a suite of new technologies including virtual reality, algorithms, artificial learning, machine creativity and virtual personal assistants. These technologies will have a profound impact on the way we engage with consumers. But while all this technology will change so much, it is actually having a fascinating, unexpected and juxtaposing very human counter-trend: it is bringing us all together.

As we embrace smartphones, social media and virtual reality, we are becoming more connected to each other. We are publishing, sharing, engaging and now empathising with real stories from real people from across the world, and sharing our universal human emotion.

Social media started our journey: we have became the creators of our own stories and we publish and share them relentlessly. This trend has been coupled with a decline in trust and credibility from the traditional message carriers: politicians, corporate spokespeople and celebrities (for more, read In Mistrust We Trust, by Ivan Krastev). So the stories of our own lives have became those we engaged with our friends, our family and even of strangers. Those that pull at our emotions are the most shared.

But now, with the arrival of virtual reality, we are able to put ourselves in someone’s world and see and hear exactly what it is like to be in their shoes. These are the stories that are creating empathy, and are the stories that are working best.